Pepys, Samuel

born Feb. 23, 1633, London, Eng.

died May 26, 1703, London

English diarist and public official.

Born into a humble family, Pepys was appointed about 1659 as a clerk in the office of the Exchequer, where on Jan. 1, 1660, he began the diary for which he is chiefly known. He steadily improved his position, in time becoming secretary of the Admiralty, a member of Parliament, president of the Royal Society, trusted confidant of Charles II and James II, and friend of the great scholars of his age. His diary (published 1825), which he kept through 1669, presents a fascinating picture of the official and upper-class life in Restoration London, with vivid, honest accounts of ordinary as well as great events, including the Plague and the Great Fire of London.

Pepys, oil painting by John Hayls, 1666; in the National Portrait Gallery, London

By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

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▪ English diarist and naval administrator

Introduction

born February 23, 1633, London, England

died May 26, 1703, London

 English diarist and naval administrator, celebrated for his Diary (first published in 1825), which gives a fascinating picture of the official and upper-class life of Restoration London from Jan. 1, 1660, to May 31, 1669.

Life

      Pepys was the son of a working tailor who had come to London from Huntingdonshire, in which county, and in Cambridgeshire, his family had lived for centuries as monastic reeves, rent collectors, farmers, and, more recently, small gentry. His mother, Margaret Kite, was the sister of a Whitechapel butcher. But, though of humble parentage, Pepys rose to be one of the most important men of his day, becoming England's earliest secretary of the Admiralty and serving in his time as member of Parliament, president of the Royal Society (in which office he placed his imprimatur on the title page of England's greatest scientific work, Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica), master of Trinity House and of the Clothworkers' Company, and a baron of the Cinque Ports. He was the trusted confidant both of Charles II, from whom he took down in shorthand the account of his escape after the Battle of Worcester, and of James II, whose will he witnessed before the royal flight in 1688. The friends of his old age included Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Isaac Newton, John Evelyn, Sir Godfrey Kneller, John Dryden, and almost every great scholar of the age.

Early career.

      Samuel Pepys (pronounced peeps) was sent, after early schooling at Huntingdon, to St. Paul's School, London. In 1650 he was entered at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, but instead went as a sizar to Magdalene College, obtaining a scholarship on the foundation. In March 1653 he took his B.A. degree and in 1660 that of M.A. Little is known of his university career save that he was once admonished for being “scandalously overserved with drink.” In later years he became a great benefactor of his college, to which he left his famous library of books and manuscripts. He was also once offered—but refused—the provostship of King's College, Cambridge.

      In December 1655 he married a penniless beauty of 15, Elizabeth Marchant de Saint-Michel, daughter of a French Huguenot refugee. At this time he was employed as factotum in the Whitehall lodgings of his cousin Adm. Edward Montagu, later 1st earl of Sandwich (Sandwich, Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of, Viscount Hinchingbrooke, Baron Montagu of Saint Neots), who was high in the lord protector Cromwell's favour. In his diary Pepys recalls this humble beginning, when his young wife “used to make coal fires and wash my foul clothes with her own hand for me, poor wretch! in our little room at Lord Sandwich's; for which I ought forever to love and admire her, and do.” While there, on March 26, 1658, he underwent a serious abdominal operation, thereafter always celebrating the anniversary of his escape by a dinner—“This being my solemn feast for my cutting of the stone.”

      In 1659 Pepys accompanied Montagu on a voyage to the Sound. About the same time he was appointed to a clerkship of £50 per annum in the office of George Downing, one of the tellers of the Exchequer, after whom Downing Street was later named. It was while working in Downing's office and living in a small house in Axe Yard that on Jan. 1, 1660, he began his diary. A few months later he sailed, as his cousin's secretary, with the fleet that brought back Charles II from exile. Appointed, through Montagu's interest at court, clerk of the acts of the navy at a salary of £350 per annum and given an official residence in the navy office in Seething Lane, he became in the next few years a justice of the peace, a commissioner for and, later, treasurer of, Tangier, and surveyor of naval victualling. When he entered upon his functions, he was ignorant of almost everything that belonged to them. His chief use of his position was to enjoy his newfound importance and the convivial companionship of his colleagues, admirals Sir William Batten and Sir William Penn. But early in 1662 there came a change. The colleagues whose bacchanalian habits and social position had made them so attractive began to prove irksome, and their insistence on their superior experience and status galled Pepys's pride. In his isolation, he sought for ways by which he could show himself their equal. He had not far to look, for his fellow officers were anything but attentive to business. “So to the office,” Pepys wrote, “where I do begin to be exact in my duty there and exacting my privileges and shall continue to do so.” He had found his vocation.

Naval administration.

      It was not in Pepys's nature to do things by halves. Having resolved to do his duty, he set out to equip himself for its performance. In the summer of 1662 he occupied his leisure moments by learning the multiplication table, listening to lectures on shipbuilding, and studying the prices of naval stores: “into Thames Street, beyond the Bridge, and there enquired among the shops the price of tar and oil, and do find great content in it, and hope to save the King money by this practise.” At the same time, he began his habit of making careful entries of all contracts and memoranda in large vellum books—beautifully ruled by Elizabeth Pepys and her maids—and of keeping copies of his official letters.

      The qualities of industry and devotion to duty that Pepys brought to the service of the Royal Navy (Royal Navy, The) became realized during the Second Dutch War of 1665–67—years in which he remained at his post throughout the Plague and saved the navy office in the Great Fire of London. Before trouble with his eyesight caused him to discontinue his diary in 1669—an event followed by the death of his wife—these qualities had won him the trust of the King (Charles II) and his brother James (James II), the duke of York, the lord high admiral. In 1673, in the middle of the Third Dutch War, when York's unpopular conversion to Catholicism forced him to resign his office, Pepys was appointed secretary to the new commission of Admiralty and, as such, administrative head of the navy. In order to represent it in Parliament—before whom he had conducted a masterly defense of his office some years before—he became member first for Castle Rising and, later, for Harwich. For the next six years he was engaged in stamping out the corruption that had paralyzed the activities of the navy. His greatest achievement was carrying through Parliament a program that, by laying down 30 new ships of the line, restored the balance of sea power, upset by the gigantic building programs of France and the Netherlands. In his work both at the Admiralty and in Parliament, Pepys's unbending passion for efficiency and honesty (combined with a certain childlike insistence on his own virtue and capacity for being always in the right) made for him powerful and bitter enemies. One of these was Lord Shaftesbury (Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of, Baron Cooper of Pawlett, Baron Ashley of Wimborne St. Giles), who in 1678 endeavoured to strike at the succession and at the Catholic successor, the Duke of York, by implicating Pepys in the mysterious murder of the London magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the crime on which the full credulity of the populace in the Popish Plot depended. When Pepys produced an unanswerable alibi, his enemies endeavoured to fasten Godfrey's murder on him indirectly by accusing his confidential clerk, Samuel Atkins. Despite the third-degree methods employed against him, Pepys also proved an alibi for Atkins, who would otherwise almost certainly have perished. Six months later, his enemies brought into England a picturesque scoundrel and blackmailer called John Scott, who had begun his life of crime in what today is Long Island, New York, and whom Pepys had endeavoured to have arrested at the time of Godfrey's death on account of his mysterious activities disguised as a Jesuit. Pepys was flung into the Tower on an absurd charge of treason brought against him by Scott and supported by the Exclusionists in Parliament, as also on a minor and equally unjust charge of popery, brought against him by a dismissed butler whom he had caught in bed with his favourite maid. Had not Charles II almost immediately dissolved Parliament and prevented a new one from meeting for a further year and a half, Pepys would have paid the penalty for his loyalty, efficiency, and incorruptibility with his life. He employed his respite with such energy that by the time Parliament met again he had completely blasted the reputation of his accuser.

      In 1683, when the King felt strong enough to ignore his opponents, Pepys was taken back into the public service. He had accompanied the Duke of York in the previous year on a voyage to Scotland, and he now sailed as adviser to the Earl of Dartmouth to evacuate the English garrison of Tangier—a voyage that he described in a further journal.

      On his return, in the spring of 1684, he was recalled by Charles II to his old post. Entitled secretary of the affairs of the Admiralty of England and remunerated by a salary of £500 per annum, he combined the modern offices of first lord and secretary of the Admiralty, both administering the service and answering for it in Parliament. For the next four and a half years, including the whole of James II's reign, Pepys was one of the greatest men in England, controlling the largest spending department of state. With his habitual courage and industry, he set himself to rebuild the naval edifice that the inefficiency and corruption of his enemies had shattered, securing in 1686 the appointment of a special commission “for the Recovery of the Navy.” When, at the beginning of 1689, after James II had been driven from the country, Pepys retired, he had created a navy strong enough to maintain a long ascendancy in the world's seas. When Pepys became associated with the navy in 1660, the line of battle had consisted of 30 battleships of a total burden of approximately 25,000 tons and carrying 1,730 guns. When he laid down his office, he left a battle line of 59 ships of a total burden of 66,000 tons and carrying 4,492 guns. Not only had he doubled the navy's fighting strength, but he had given it what it had never possessed before and what it never again lost—a great administrative tradition of order, discipline, and service.

      “To your praises,” declared the orator of Oxford University, “the whole ocean bears witness; truly, sir, you have encompassed Britain with wooden walls.” Pepys's last 14 years, despite attempts by his political adversaries to molest him, were spent in honourable retirement in his riverside house in York Buildings, amassing and arranging the library that he ultimately left to Magdalene College, Cambridge, corresponding with scholars and artists, and collecting material for a history of the navy that he never lived to complete, though he published a prelude to it in 1690, describing his recent work at the Admiralty, entitled Memoires relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England for ten years determined December 1688. He died at the Clapham home of his former servant and lifelong friend William Hewer. His fellow diarist John Evelyn wrote of him: “He was universally belov'd, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very greate cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation.”

The diary

      The diary by which Pepys is chiefly known was kept between his 27th and 36th years. Written in Thomas Shelton's system of shorthand, or tachygraphy, with the names in longhand, it extends to 1,250,000 words, filling six quarto volumes in the Pepys Library. It is far more than an ordinary record of its writer's thoughts and actions; it is a supreme work of art, revealing on every page the capacity for selecting the small, as well as the large, essential that conveys the sense of life; and it is probably, after the Bible and James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, the best bedside book in the English language. One can open it on any page and lose oneself in the life of Charles II's London, and of this vigorous, curious, hardworking, pleasure-loving man. Pepys wanted to find out about everything because he found everything interesting. He never seemed to have a dull moment; he could not, indeed, understand dullness. One of the more comical entries in his diary refers to a country cousin, named Stankes, who came to stay with him in London. Pepys had been looking forward to showing him the sights of the town—

But Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed by my wife and Ashwell to go to a play, nor to White Hall, or to see the lions, though he was carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon earth a man so little curious in the world as he is.

      Pepys possessed the journalist's gift of summing up a scene or person in a few brilliant, arresting words. He makes us see what he sees in a flash: his Aunt James, “a poor, religious, well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me”; and his sister Pall, “a pretty, good-bodied woman and not over thick, as I thought she would have been, but full of freckles and not handsome in the face.” He could describe with wonderful vividness a great scene: as, for example, the day General George Monck's soldiers unexpectedly marched into a sullen City and proclaimed there should be a free Parliament—“And Bow bells and all the bells in all the churches as we went home were a-ringing; it was past imagination, both the greatness and suddenness of it.” He described, too, the Restoration and coronation; the horrors of the Plague; and the Fire of London (Great Fire of London), writing down his account—so strong was the artist in him—even as his home and its treasures were being threatened with destruction:

We saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruine.

      Above all, Pepys possessed the artist's gift of being able to select the vital moment. He makes his readers share the very life of his time: “I staid up till the bell-man came by with his bell just under my window as I was writing of this very line, and cried, ‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, and frosty, windy morning.' ” He tells of the guttering candle, “which makes me write thus slobberingly”; of his new watch—“But Lord! to see how much of my old folly and childishness hangs on me still that I cannot forebear carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all the afternoon and seeing what o'clock it is one hundred times”; of being awakened in the night—

About 3 o'clock this morning I waked with the noise of the rain, having never in my life heard a more violent shower; and then the cat was locked in the chamber and kept a great mewing and leapt upon the bed, which made me I could not sleep a great while.

      Pepys excluded nothing from his journal that seemed to him essential, however much it told against himself. He not only recorded his major infidelities and weaknesses; he put down all those little meannesses of thought and conduct of which all men are guilty but few admit, even to themselves. He is frank about his vanity—as, for example, in his account of the day he went to church for the first time in his new periwig: “I found that my coming in a perriwig did not prove so strange to the world as I was afeared it would, for I thought that all the church would presently have cast their eyes upon me, but I found no such thing”; about his meannesses over money, his jealousies, and his injustices—“Home and found all well, only myself somewhat vexed at my wife's neglect in leaving her scarfe, waistcoat and night dressings in the coach today; though I confess she did give them to me to look after.” For he possessed in a unique degree the quality of complete honesty. His diary paints not only his own infirmities but the frailty of all mankind.

      After the successful publication of John Evelyn's diary in 1818, Pepys's diary was transcribed—with great accuracy—by John Smith, later rector of Baldock, Hertfordshire.

Sir Arthur Bryant

Additional Reading

Biographical and critical studies include J.R. Tanner, Samuel Pepys and the Royal Navy (1920, reprinted 1977), and Mr. Pepys: An Introduction to the Diary Together with a Sketch of His Later Life (1924, reprinted 1971); Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys, new ed., 3 vol. (1947–49); Cecil S. Emden, Pepys Himself (1963, reprinted 1980); Richard W. Barber, Samuel Pepys, Esquire (1970); Geoffrey Trease, Samuel Pepys and His World (1972); Richard Ollard, Pepys (1974, reissued 1984); and Ivan E. Taylor, Samuel Pepys, updated ed. (1989). Pepys's letters are available in Helen Truesdell Heath (ed.), The Letters of Samuel Pepys and His Family Circle (1955).

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